Mixed media probes divided nation

Untitled, drawing for the film Sobriety, Obesity & Growing Old, 1991, charcoal and pastel on paper, by William Kentridge.

William Kentridge's animations have captured his memories of apartheid, writes Ashley Crawford.

For many years, as he watched others deprived of so many things, artist William Kentridge was also experiencing deprivation, albeit of a somewhat gentler nature.

Kentridge grew up amid the societal angst and turmoil of Johannesburg's apartheid. These were the times of international backlash against the policy of apartheid and white South Africa was a pariah.

Embargos were aplenty and a developing artist had little hope of international curators or writers stepping foot in that city.

Today, with apartheid effectively eradicated but still a vivid memory, William Kentridge is well and truly on the world stage.

His intense charcoal drawings and animations, largely inspired by his experiences under a harsh regime, have become sought-after collectors' items and a curatorial must-have for museums and galleries around the world.

Kentridge's drawings stand alone as powerful, gestural recordings of memories and semi-fictional mis-en scenes, but it is his animations that have left audiences spell-bound.

Australia will have several opportunities to see Kentridge's work first-hand this year.

Today, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image will screen 12 Kentridge works from 1989 to 1997.

In September, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney will present a survey exhibition of films and drawings, and later this year Kentridge will present a recently composed opera, based on his existing work, in Melbourne.

Kentridge's films originate as single charcoal drawings, which are then painstakingly modified through a unique process of erasure and re-drawing.

They are Kentridge's attempt to make sense of the turbulent and violent times that characterised the later period of apartheid and to address the dramatic and historical events in South Africa in the 1980s and '90s.

Kentridge has invented the imaginary saga of Johannesburg industrialist Soho Eckstein and his alter ego, the naked, sensual artist, lover and dreamer, Felix Teitlebaum, to portray the realities of daily life alongside the broader moral and ethical issues faced by the developing nation of South Africa, and communities the world over.

"All three projects, the films at ACMI, the survey at the MCA and the opera use many of the same techniques and characters," says the softly spoken Kentridge from his Johannesburg home.

One of his first films, from 1989, was titled Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris. Having visited Johannesburg earlier this year, I was relieved to hear that this title was firmly tongue-in-cheek.

I told Kentridge of the unnerving hints of apartheid that I felt were still in the air; the gated mansions of the whites, the tendency for managers to be white and staff black.

"Some parts of the city are totally transformed," Kentridge says. "Unfortunately, some sections are absolutely as before. When I was growing up, in the 1970s, the divide was total."

Kentridge's character Soho Eckstein came to the artist in a dream. "He had been in early linocuts, in photographs taken on the beach, and I realised he was much closer to me than I had known."

Not unlike the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who is currently showing at the Jewish Museum in Melbourne, Kentridge's images are part of a larger politicised and social story.

"The drawings are to some degree in service to the films," he says. "They are a sequence of narratives. I am trying to find strategies to film recondite images."

Among the images Kentridge uses in his work is that of the beach: "The grammar of waves," he says. "Deck chairs dancing, transforming, the sequence is not what the narrative line would be. The beaches are from my memory, segregated, the white beaches and the black beaches, Baptist choirs and white surfers."

Kentridge's choice for hand-drawn illustration over photographic or video media is carefully considered. "With photography there is that question, was it staged? Was it manipulated? Whereas with the hand drawn it is a construction, someone will know the terrain. I think in that context there is a big role, not as agitprop, but in the sense of how we construct the world ourselves, our personal geography occupying the space where we are."